“Chess problems are the
hymn-tunes of mathematics.”
— G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology
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“The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”
– Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves
"I named this script ocode and chmod 755'd it to make it executable…"
— Software forum post on the OCR program Tesseract
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From the author of
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:
"Like so many other heroes
who have seen the light
of a higher order…."
Yesterday morning's post "First Step" quoted an essay by Michael Spitzer
published online in Aeon on October 18 —
https://aeon.co/essays/
can-music-give-you-an-orgasm-the-short-answer-is-yes .
A look at earlier essays in that publication reveals . . .
Related material — From a search for Wertheim in this journal —
“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
The December 2012 Notices of the American
Mathematical Society has an ad on page 1564
(in a review of two books on vulgarized mathematics)
for three workshops next year on “Low-dimensional
Topology, Geometry, and Dynamics”—
(Only the top part of the ad is shown; for further details
see an ICERM page.)
(ICERM stands for Institute for Computational
and Experimental Research in Mathematics.)
The ICERM logo displays seven subcubes of
a 2x2x2 eight-cube array with one cube missing—
The logo, apparently a stylized image of the architecture
of the Providence building housing ICERM, is not unlike
a picture of Froebel’s Third Gift—
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman from the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring (co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
The eighth cube, missing in the ICERM logo and detached in the
Froebel Cubes photo, may be regarded as representing the origin
(0,0,0) in a coordinatized version of the 2x2x2 array—
in other words the cube invariant under linear , as opposed to
more general affine , permutations of the cubes in the array.
These cubes are not without relevance to the workshops’ topics—
low-dimensional exotic geometric structures, group theory, and dynamics.
See The Eightfold Cube, A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168, and
The Quaternion Group Acting on an Eightfold Cube.
Those who insist on vulgarizing their mathematics may regard linear
and affine group actions on the eight cubes as the dance of
Snow White (representing (0,0,0)) and the Seven Dwarfs—
.
The following picture provides a new visual approach to
the order-8 quaternion group's automorphisms.
Click the above image for some context.
Here the cube is called "eightfold" because the eight vertices,
like the eight subcubes of a 2×2×2 cube,* are thought of as
independently movable. See The Eightfold Cube.
See also…
Related material: Robin Chapman and Karen E. Smith
on the quaternion group's automorphisms.
* See Margaret Wertheim's Christmas Eve remarks on mathematics
and the following eightfold cube from an institute she co-founded—
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
From Margaret Wertheim's "Outsider Physicists and the Oh-My-God Particle," New Scientist , Dec. 24, 2011—
For the past 18 years I have been collecting the works of what I have come to call "outsider physicists". I now have more than 100 such theories on my shelves. Most of them are single papers, but a number are fully fledged books, often filled with equations and technical diagrams (though I do have one that is couched as a series of poems and another that is written as a fairy tale)….
The mainstream science world has a way of dealing with people like this— dismiss them as cranks and dump their letters in the bin. While I do not believe any outsider I have encountered has done any work that challenges mainstream physics, I have come to believe that they should not be so summarily ignored.
Consider the sheer numbers. Outsider physicists have their own organisation, the Natural Philosophy Alliance, whose database lists more than 2100 theorists, 5800 papers and over 1300 books worldwide. They have annual conferences, with this year's proceedings running to 735 pages. In the time I have been observing the organisation, the NPA has grown from a tiny seed whose founder photocopied his newsletter onto pastel-coloured paper to a thriving international association with video-streamed events.
The NPA's website tells us that the group is devoted "to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels, of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas".
Very little unites this disparate group of amateurs— there are as many theories as members— except for a common belief that "something is drastically wrong in contemporary physics and cosmology, and that a new spirit of open-mindedness is desperately needed". They are unanimous in the view that mainstream physics has been hijacked by a kind of priestly caste who speak a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible to most human beings. They claim that the natural world speaks a language which all of us can, or should be able to, understand.
"…a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible…."
For instance, the "secret language" of Dr. Garret Sobczyk?
See a brief paper by Sobczyk in the NPA Proceedings described above.
See also Sobczyk in the February 2012 Notices of the American Mathematical Society —
"Conformal Mappings in Geometric Algebra"—
This AMS article, together with Sobczyk's list of previous publications,
indicates that, despite his appearance in the NPA Proceedings , he is definitely not a crank.
Unfortunately, publication in the Notices does not by itself guarantee respectability.
For an example, see the Mathematics and Narrative post of Dec. 13, 2011.
“My pursuits are a joke
in that the universe is a joke.
One has to reflect
the universe faithfully.”
— John Frederick Michell
Feb. 9, 1933 –
April 24, 2009
— Robert A. Heinlein,
The Number of the Beast
For Marisa Tomei
(born Dec. 4, 1964) —
on the day that
Bob Seger turns 64 —
A Joke:
Points All Her Own
Points All Her Own,
Part I:
(For the backstory, see
the Log24 entries and links
on Marisa Tomei’s birthday
last year.)
Points All Her Own,
Part II:
(For the backstory, see
Galois Geometry:
The Simplest Examples.)
Points All Her Own,
Part III:
(For the backstory, see
Geometry of the I Ching
and the history of
Chinese philosophy.)
In simpler terms:
Through the
Looking Glass:
A Sort of Eternity
From the new president’s inaugural address:
“… in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
The words of Scripture:
“through a glass”—
[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron].
Childish things:
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Not-so-childish:
Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:
Through a glass, darkly:
A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations–
a 180-degree rotation:
(Click on image
for further details.)
But then face to face:
A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections– not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.
Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.
These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.
For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.
Related material:
The central aim of Western religion–
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) The central aim of Western philosophy– Dualities of Pythagoras as reconstructed by Aristotle: Limited Unlimited Odd Even Male Female Light Dark Straight Curved ... and so on .... “Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.” — Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993) “In the garden of Adding — The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000) A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded: “Art inherited from the old religion — Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52 From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space: “We have now reached
“Space: what you — James Joyce, Ulysses |
Wikipedia on Rubik's 2×2×2 "Pocket Cube"–
"Any permutation of the 8 corner cubies is possible (8! positions)."
Some pages related to this claim–
Analyzing Rubik's Cube with GAP
Online JavaScript Pocket Cube.
The claim is of course trivially true for the unconnected subcubes of Froebel's Third Gift:
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
See also:
MoMA Goes to Kindergarten,
Tea Privileges,
and
"Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith:
A Dialogue,"
an exhibition opening today
at Pace Wildenstein.
For a different sort
of dialogue, click on the
artists' names above.
For a different
approach to S8,
see Symmetries.
"With humor, my dear Zilkov.
Always with a little humor."
-- The Manchurian Candidate
An Indiana Jones Xmas
continues…
Chalice, Grail,
Whatever
Last night on TNT:
The Librarian Part 3:
Curse of the Judas Chalice,
in which The Librarian
encounters the mysterious
Professor Lazlo
Related material:
An Arthur Waite quotation
from the Feast of St. Nicholas:
“It is like the lapis exilis of
the German Graal legend”
as well as
yesterday’s entry
relating Margaret Wertheim’s
“Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:
A History of Space from
Dante to the Internet”
to a different sort of space–
that of the I Ching— and to
Professor Laszlo Lovasz’s
“cube space”
“Click on the Yellow Book.”
Happy birthday, David Carradine.
On a book by Margaret Wertheim:
“She traces the history of space beginning with the cosmology of Dante. Her journey continues through the historical foundations of celestial space, relativistic space, hyperspace, and, finally, cyberspace.” –Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago, in Library Journal, 1999 (quoted at Amazon.com)
There are also other sorts of space.
© 2005 The Institute for FiguringThis photo may serve as an
introduction to a different
sort of space.
See The Eightfold Cube.
For the religious meaning
of this small space, see
For a related larger space,
see the entry and links of
St. Augustine’s Day, 2006.
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OCODE
"The first credential
— Ezra Pound, "OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine vision." — Wikipedia "I named this script ocode and chmod 755'd it to make it executable…" — Software forum post on the OCR program Tesseract
Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008:
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"Like so many other heroes
who have seen the light
of a higher order…."
For further backstory,
click on the mouse.
— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion
Several voices:
Margaret Wertheim in today’s
Los Angeles Times and at
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and
Madeleine L’Engle and husband.
From Wertheim’s Pearly Gates:
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”
The Fullness of Time
In memory of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who died yesterday:
“Having solved one of the basic mysteries of life here on Earth, Dr. Crick seems happy to skewer any notions of a life beyond. For him, the most profound implication of an operational understanding of consciousness is that ‘it will lead to the death of the soul.’
‘The view of ourselves as “persons” is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth,’ he said. He predicted that ‘this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years.’
‘In the fullness of time,’ he continued, ‘educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.'”
— “After the Double Helix: Unraveling the Mysteries of the State of Being,” by Margaret Wertheim in The New York Times of April 13, 2004
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